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Outstanding speech by Matti Friedman about reporting on Israel

…How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 percent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other?

We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylized symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks – not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers.

There is no practice of real journalism.
That is obvious by the promotion of certain “news” agendas and the ignoring of any “real news” that doesn’t promote the “party line”.

What is on offer is marxist journalism and “real world” facts suppression.

Frau Katze

It is getting worse or has it always been like this?

simus1

It is accelerating. It was most apparent to me when Gov Palen was chosen by McCain and our media party savaged her in lockstep with the American MSM. The fact that Palen was a woman, had defeated a corrupt two party old boys Alaska/DC club by reaching office, and was by all accounts the most Canada friendly American Gov in the last 100 years cut no ice with our bolshie journos.

Norman_In_New_York

Now that we have laws requiring truth in lending and truth in packaging, we need laws requiring truth in news reporting.

Frau Katze

It’s really shocking. It spills over over into numerous other areas (besides Israel) too, as I am sure I don’t need to tell you.

It started with a few journalists who wanted to be ‘in’, i.e. in step with the most outrageous fashionable ideas, perhaps because they took drugs with some farout types. Gradually, because journalists are essentially conventional, non-thinking persons, these front-liners intimidated other journalists into following their line – e.g. in watering holes where they congregate, anyone who said the wrong thing was hooted down, made to feel shame at not being ‘in’. This is the sociological phenomenon of group-think.